Microsoft Dynamics GP Year-End Maintenance Best Practices
Posted by Matt Green on Fri, Feb 03, 2012
It’s a busy time year. Many savvy Microsoft Dynamics GP users are fast at work with numerous activities centered on closing General Ledger, Payables Managements, and other various modules in GP. The climatic end may have arrived for some, but other are still vastly awaiting the dust to settle and/or Chuck Norris to show up in your server room to execute a few round house kicks. Regardless of your status, there are some good year-end maintenance practices you may want to look into after year-end closing.
- Optimizing Indexes
- Archiving Historical Data
After year-end closing, rebuilding or reorganizing indexes can vastly improve performance. The two types of fragmentation, internal and external, occur when modifying data in your database using UPDATE, INSERT, or DELETE statements. Optimize these indexes to get back up to speed. (Learn more about Optimizing Indexes in Microsoft Dynamics GP.)
Also after year-end closing, archiving past years of historical data is a good practice. Set yourself up for a faster, more efficient fiscal year by transferring and removing data into a historical database, leaving your production database lean, mean and ready to dominate the New Year.
Archiving historical data will reduce the clutter in your inquiries and reports in Dynamics GP. Even though you can put date ranges on many GP reports, you can still end up with a lot of “noise,” restricting you from viewing the useful data. This will get rid of that clutter and allows you to make faster and more effective decisions. While reducing clutter, archiving will increase performance in your lookups, reports, and inquiry windows.
If SQL has to scan through millions upon millions of rows from temporary tables it generates, it can take some time to populate. After removing this historical data, taking a table with, say, 2 million rows and cutting it down to a few thousand, you will see performance improvements in these areas:
- Lookups
- Reports
- Inquiries
- Overall Operation
Archiving data and assistance with database fragmentation can be done in a fast, cost-effective way with the Microsoft Dynamics GP archive tool, Company Data Archive.
February CDA Promotion
Mention the February “Valentine's Day” promotion to receive 14% off Company Data Archive.
*CDA must be purchase by February 29 to take advantage of this promotion. Discount applies to software costs only.